LY N N M E S K E L L L I N D S AY W E I S S

Coetzee on South Africas Past: Remembering in the Time of Forgetting

ABSTRACT As an intellectual gure in South Africa, J. M. Coetzee has consistently engaged with the politics of the past, particularly the contemporary ethical ramications of the colonial past, alongside the more recent and bitter history of oppression under apartheid. As archaeologists, we aim to excavate these engagements through his novels and essays, particularly his long-standing concerns with the Khoekhoe communities of the Cape. In South Africa today, the tensions between remembering and forgetting are palpable and, in the aftermath of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC), we suggest that not all forgetting can be cast as therapeutic. Throughout his complex relationships with the nations history, Coetzee foregrounds the colonial past and reiterates the ethical responsibilities of remembering so that the patterns of the past are not repeated. [Keywords: South Africa, apartheid, archaeology, colonialism]

N THIS ARTICLE, we argue that J. M. Coetzee has been instrumental in foregrounding the deprivations of colonialism in South Africathe long history of oppression and discrimination that found its logical and evil outcome in apartheid. It was not simply the immediate horror of the National Partys racial solutions for the nation that grip our, or Coetzees, ethical worldview, but the invidious history of European invasion, colonization, and long-lived genocide that ultimately hardened into the politics of apartness witnessed in the 20th century. In excavating South Africas histories, Coetzees cultural productions constitute increasingly important sites for the analysis of identity, indigeneity, and the politics of the past. Thus, we counter the claims that his narratives take part in a form of colonialist allegorism and thus elide historical responsibility. We do so by focusing on specic texts that underscore his concern with the politics and legacies of imperialism. The tactics of forgetting have come to be so characteristic of South African politics that his writing holds special relevance for the contemporary reader. Coetzees work warns his readers that forgetting forfeits learning from the lessons of the past. As archaeologists, we are particularly interested in his placing of history, his complex relationship to historical questions, and his concerns with the longer history of colonialism in South Africa and the individuals and identities it has subsequently produced. We suggest that Coetzee is as important for the past as he is for the present.

HISTORICAL BACKGROUND To situate Coetzees own historical and ethical interests, we begin with a brief outline of South African colonial history, specically at the Cape, because it forms his primary point of reference. Although it is understandable that national attention has been focused on the late-20th-century regimes of oppression, it is crucial to examine the roots of racial discrimination in South Africaroots that did not begin in 1948, instead preceding even the industrialization of South Africas economy (pace Keegan 1996). Rather, we need to return to the beginnings of Dutch colonization of the Cape of Good Hope in 1652 and the consolidation of a slave economy based on a trade connecting East Africa and Southeast Asia. As President Thabo Mbeki reminded the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) in 1999, Jan van Riebeeck planted a hedge of almond and thornbush . . . to ensure the safety of the white European settlers by keeping the menacing black African hordes of primitive pagans at bay (Wits 2003:253). This physical separation marked the rst apartheid and the onset of colonial and racial oppression in South Africa. It also forms a backdrop for the colonial encounter that constitutes Waiting for the Barbarians (Coetzee 1980), a text considered by many to be his best-known work (Attridge 2005:42), and one we pay particular attention to throughout this article. European settlement of the Cape began with the establishment of a fort run by the Dutch East India Company. At the outset there was no interest in establishing a

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Meskell and Weiss Coetzee on South Africas Past colony; the fort was simply envisaged as a base for resupplying its ships with fresh meat and milk obtained from the indigenous Khoekhoe population. Fraught relations with the indigenous communities, who objected to the poor terms of trade offered, changed that situation (Marks 1972). Under the leadership of Jan van Riebeeck, Dutch East India company ofcials, alongside the emergent freeburghers, embarked on a series of frontier wars with the aim of driving the Khoekhoe from their land and replacing them with commercial farms run by European settlers and worked by imported slaves (Ross 1993). From the rst intimation of Khoesan resistance to enslavement and unfair trading conditions, colonists came to interpret and characterize their profound differences in critical racialized terms and reductive ethnic taxonomies; this occurred hand in hand with the importation of slaves to the Cape and the forced labor of local Khoekhoe (Shell 1994). As we argue, these historical events loom large in Coetzees writing and played a formative role in his own education, as evidenced in his biographical work, Boyhood: A Memoir (1997). As has been said of his novel, Elizabeth Costello: Eight Lessons (2003), his choice of genre could be described as non-nonction: a hybrid writing of history, social commentary, and ction. As his title character (also a novelist) says therein, Like history too, the novel is an investigation into the power of character and the power of circumstance. By exploring the power of the past to produce the present, the novel suggests how we may explore the potential of the present to produce the future (Coetzee 2003:39). Through this mise en abyme, Coetzee is clearly proffering his own ethical stanceall the more notable because Coetzee himself delivered several chapters of Elizabeth Costello as university lecturesthat nds resonance throughout his quasi-ctional writing on South Africas colonial past and its legacy. In positioning the past for the purposes of this article, it is important to point out that the Cape colony constituted a complex locale and the earliest site of continuous European settlement in sub-Saharan Africa. As a result, slaves were primarily imported into, rather than out of, South Africa, in contrast to the rest of the African continent. This labor system was in many ways perpetuated throughout the mineral revolution of the 1860s80s (see Clark and Worger 2004; Macmillan 1969; Wolpe 1972). One crucial outcome of the slave-based economy was that in the 19th century South Africa achieved the greatest afuence on the continent. Following the demise of slavery, and perhaps as a response to the political vacuum created in its wake, the early 19th century saw an expansion, rather than a reduction, of racist ideology within the sciences as well as popular literature. What abolition had disassembled quickly came to be reassembled within the taxonomies of the degenerate races of South Africa (Gilman 1986; Lindfors 1996; Wright 1996), categories that ultimately came to be reied in the arena of legal recognition during the colonial transitions from the mercantilist rule of the Dutch East India Company to the imperial phase of British rule (Elbourne 2003). As European settlement expanded, the British government approached

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African societies within the modality of conquest, which led imperialists and settlers alike to reiterate the civilizing mission of white rule and thus the segregation of black from white (Clark and Worger 2004:3). Although often ambiguous and contradictory, social critiques of Africans and their lack of social organization came to constitute the permissive ideological factor in the economic and territorial projects of empire as it unfolded at the Cape (Crais 1992). The legacy of such colonial attitudes is addressed directly by Coetzee in a number of novels, and in his essays more generally, in what he calls the discourse of the Cape (1988). As historians and archaeologists have ably demonstrated (Hall 1987, 1993; Mitchell 2002), southern Africa had long experienced settlement by various African, European, and Asian peoples over the centuries. Archaeological sites documenting sophisticated trade kingdoms dating to as early as 1000 C.E. were either ignored by colonial ofcials or, as in the case of Great Zimbabwe, ascribed to exterior civilizationsas the prospect of African civilization was anathema to the white labor interests of the time (Garlake 1973; Hall 1990; Lipton 1985). However, these same histories and civilizations enabled colonists to take refuge at the Cape in the mid17th century. Importantly, archaeological sites in the Cape, more generally, have come to document a Khoesan history that does not neatly t into colonialera racial or ethnic typologies (Schrire 1992) or similar historical narratives of technological diffusionism that derive from Eurocentric social templates equating social complexity with hierarchical systems of coercive labor (Abrahams 1985). In sum, although the mechanisms through which minority rule established control of labor and local populations were to eventually abolish slavery and serfdom in the Cape colony, the political reication of race and tribe had lasting effects on South African society. The residual effect of centuries of slavery and forced labor, in addition to the tribal ethnicities forged by the British system of indirect rule, continues to constitute a challenge to the politics of recognition within a deracialized South African government (Mamdani 1996). The work of excavating and reguring the racialized ideologies forged during colonial rule involves visiting sites that lay bare their inner workings; for Coetzee, this means visiting the most iconic bastion of minority rulethe colonial outpost.

A BARBARIC PAST Although we survey broadly across Coetzees writing, much of this article is focused on Waiting for the Barbariansa book that has been described as a pivotal work in the development of Coetzees oeuvre. Published in 1980, Waiting for the Barbarians takes place at a frontier outpost somewhere within the reaches of empire, recognized as a universalized representation of South Africas colonial history. Our interest in this novel connects to his essays in White Writing (1988), which elaborate Coetzees orientation toward the question of historical method. Specically, his rst essay in this collection focuses on idleness as a construct of

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American Anthropologist Vol. 108, No. 1 March 2006 out the subjugation and exploitation of indigenous South Africans, but projecting forward, neither could the opulence and cloistered security of many 20th-century white South Africans be afforded without a similar disenfranchisement of the nations native peoples. Coetzees lead character in Age of Iron (1990), Mrs. Curren, provides an afrmation of this fact:
A crime was committed a long time ago. How long ago? I do not know. But longer ago than 1916, certainly. So long ago that I was born into it. It was part of my inheritance. It is part of me, I am part of it. Like every crime it had its price. That price I used to think would have to be paid in shame: in a life of shame and a shameful death, unlamented, in an obscure corner. I accepted that. I did not try to set myself apart. Though it was not a crime I committed, it was committed in my name. [Coetzee 1990:164]

indigenous peoples at the Cape. We see the plight of these people, the Khoekhoe, as a unifying theme throughout of much of Coetzees work and one that frames his ethical position. Coetzee describes a mutually constitutive relationship between the 17th-century scientic writer and the Khoekhoe that emerges through the critical literary trope of idleness. This trope, Coetzee argues, emerged in the wake of the inability of the earliest travelogue writers to get a successful taxonomic grip on the Khoekhoe. Because the Khoekhoe at the Cape eluded the taxonomic identiers intuitive to the 17th-century European, these writers, in turn, frequently resorted to prevailing critical Protestant notions of idleness, thereby making sense of Khoekhoe existencean existence not easily parsed into the language of European protoethnography. This move oriented the relationship between colonial administration and the Khoekhoe within the trope of developmentwhich came to have immense political ramications in negotiations for labor and trading rights. Coetzee points to the moment when the writer moves toward the register of the historical chronicler in the 19th century. As he puts it,
Once we move out of the categorical discourse of anthropology . . . to the discourse of history, which at its simplest requires the writer merely to chronicle each day the remarkable events of that day, there is far less stress on the idleness of the Hottentots. Indeed, in history the Hottentots suddenly seem all too busy, intriguing with one another, driving off cattle, begging, spying. [Coetzee 1988]

Yet within the sphere of colonial administration, particularly in terms of legal and political recognition, these racial taxonomies persisted as the core operating logic. Coetzee underscores this observation in so many of his literary depictions of colonial surveillance; furthermore, this similarly constitutes an important space of overlap between his own ctional narratives and the archaeological project. Both foreground the inherently political nature of choosing to recognize or not to recognize another people as existing on the same historical terms. Coetzee explicitly examines this suspension of the historical as it comes to be more than merely an outcome of literary convention (the discourse of the Cape) or even something systematically exploited by colonial administrators. Rather, Coetzee is most concerned to investigate this dynamic as something that the descendents of the colonial project will inevitably come to inherit and against which they will come to dene their own ethical sensibility. Coetzees characters in Waiting for the Barbarians dene themselves through such a colonial dynamic, simultaneously existing as perpetrators and legatees of historical disenfranchisement and the politics of forgetting. The title is taken from Constantine Cavafys poem of the same name in which the so-called barbarians enable the empire to array its forces and assemble its hierarchies of power through a show of force (Atwell 1993:71). The barbarians are necessary in the formidable identity constitution of their oppressors, the colonial empire. As outlined above, the mercantile empire of the Dutch and British would have been impossible with-

In another novel, In the Heart of the Country, the young heroine claims, I was born into a language of hierarchy, of distance and perspective. . . . I do not say it is the language my heart wants to speak, I feel too much the pathos of its distances (Coetzee 1982:97). In Waiting for the Barbarians, Coetzee suspends and interrupts the teleology of the colonial state (Atwell 1993:71). He reminds us that the images the state produces of its enemies are wholly contingent on, yet necessary for, the self-realized needs of colonial expansion and hegemony. Although this is certainly true of the South African context, here the authors intentions are undoubtedly to inect his narrative with the suggestion that all imperialist endeavors might be similarly arranged. Coetzee deconstructs this historical imagining, much as an ethnographer or archaeologist might peel back the recursive identity constructions of self and other in situated contexts. One of the characters in Elizabeth Costello sums up viscerally this broader embrace, imputing that since the 17th century, Europe has spread itself across the world like a cancer; stealthily at rst, but then running wild, ravaging all sorts of lifepeople, animals, plants, habitats, and languages (Coetzee 2003:45). Coetzees project is ostensibly an attack on the imperial project and, as Derek Attridge suggests (2005:3739), we would be better served turning our attention to what such metaphorical writing does instead of what it means in any narrow sense. He argues for a literal reading, one that is grounded in the experience of reading as an event, tempered by spatial, temporal, and historical contexts. And that requires actively drawing on multiple histories: social history, political history, cultural history, intellectual history, and so on. Waiting for the Barbarians locates itself strategically within that portentous moment of suspension when an increasingly defensive imperialism begins making plans for a nal reckoning with its enemies. This moment, of course, presages the coming of further repression and cruelty and underscores its paranoid and sinister rationales. Here, empire and history constellate a moment of crisis. As history even ctionalized or mythical historysuch moments inform the narrative of empire itself and both constitute

Meskell and Weiss Coetzee on South Africas Past and legitimize the use of force and terror, as characterized South Africas colonial period and apartheid era. Despite this historical setting, Coetzee has been often charged with an ahistorical lack of specicity by his critics, whereas others of us nd various ways of accounting for such readings of the text. Apartheid may inevitably rest beneath this obvious metaphor, yet as mentioned earlier, almost 350 years of colonial oppression and genocide are equally deserving of ethical attention and ineluctably provided the political and economic framework for racial segregation. On the one hand, Abdul JanMohamed (1985) has gone as far as imputing that Coetzees texts reside within the dehistoricizing and desocializing tendency of colonialist allegorism. On the other hand, he recognizes that the author challenges liberalisms complicity with fascism. Ultimately, however, JanMohamed (1985:73) sees this text as an outgrowth of white South Africas racial paranoia, rather than a scathing indictment of it. Much of this tension rests with Coetzees foregrounding of colonialism and his particular interest in the past. He has been called on to name the apartheid regime within the text, ultimately limiting the political force wielded by the text and certainly resulting in its banning at the time. According to Vincent Crapanzano (1986:95), there was a fevered anti-intellectualism in the 1980s: Brink and Bretynbach were condemned whereas Coetzee was ignored (see also Coetzee 1998). It was also the case that white South African writers were commonly considered proxies for black writers on the international stage, because the latter were effectively silenced. Writers like Coetzee were also thrust into the realm of professional academic criticism, this forum being one obvious example, with all the expectation and analysis that this entails. Coetzees interlocutors have forcefully argued that while a realist narrative would depend on the construction of a coherent image of historical time, his novel works the other way: It must dissolve such an image (Atwell 1993:143). Thus, resisting history, the central gure of the magistrate in Waiting for the Barbarians imagines himself inhabiting another temporal order, another set of possibilities for the future. Herein lies another dimension of Coetzees ethical stance. It is not that Coetzee refuses historical responsibility (contra JanMohamed 1985), because his lead character takes personal responsibility and suffers the same injustices as the supposed barbarians. It is the longue dur e e and ubiquity of such persecution that Coetzee cautions us to reect on. Sam Durrant (2004:32) describes Coetzees novels as works of failed or inconsolable mourning, claiming that the authors refusal to historicize the suffering of the dispossessed is a refusal to allow the reader to digest this suffering and then forget it. Some have referred to the novels spatiotemporal setting as the historic present, which is perhaps an apt framing for both the unsettling location of the narrative and its intended political impacts. In an interview conducted in 1978 during the zenith of apartheid, Coetzee remarked that he was inclined to see the South African situation [today] as only one manifestation of a wider historical situation to do with colonialism, late colonialism,

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neo-colonialism (Jolly 1996:135). And implicating South Africas situation with global historical processes, he added, Im suspicious of lines of division between a European context and a South African context, because I think our experience remains largely colonial (quoted in Jolly 1996:135). Critics have argued that Coetzee conveniently sidesteps the political in favor of a moral stance, in which the heart of darkness is possible in all societies. South Africa then gets transformed into an extreme example of a more general moralized theme of tyranny and suffering (Barnet 1999:292). Apartheid, and its colonial underpinnings, was one extreme historical form of totalitarianism. Any form of comfort that one could take in the recognition of apartheids extreme specicity is then elided and a wider sphere of complicity is sought. The trope of allegory is central. South African authors like Coetzee and Nadine Gordimer write about the human condition generally, giving us all pause to reect on the inescapably prosaic and personal register in which colonial rule comes to have meaning for individuals. Commentators such as Clive Barnet (1999:293) assert that we should also position novels such as Waiting for the Barbarians as metactional commentary on specic genres of white writingincluding the pastoral novel, colonial travel writing, historiography, and other canons. Readers of Waiting for the Barbarians frequently take the novels nonspecic milieu to suggest a form of ethical universalism. However in his strategic refusal of specicity, Coetzee is painfully conscious of ones immediate historical location. The milieu of the novel is the result of just such a refusal, in David Atwells (1993) view. In the 1970s, the South African government produced a number of initiatives designed to cope with unique pressures: There was a recession, an unruly labor movement, and, in 1976, the now-infamous Soweto Revolt. Externally, the Portuguese colonies in Mozambique and Angola collapsed and the civil war in Zimbabwe escalated, leading to independence by 1980. The state created commissions of inquiry and banned a number of political organizations and individualsnotably those espousing Black Consciousness in what became the total strategy. The central emphases of policy at this time were therefore managerial, technocratic, anticommunist, and military (Atwell 1993:74) much like the processes that inevitably unfold in Waiting for the Barbarians.

COETZEE EXCAVATING THE PAST An archaeological past, the remnants of precolonial life, and the subsequent depredations of the colonial encounter for indigenous people each play a signicant role in Waiting for the Barbarians. Here, we glimpse Coetzees personal interest in a specically archaeological past, something that is grounded in the materiality of South Africas colonial outposts, which have been excavated along the countrys western coast (Schrire 1989, 1995). Although not trying to push a reductive or literal reading, we might see it, however, as

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American Anthropologist Vol. 108, No. 1 March 2006 be very much at issue, alongside the politics of forgetting and a willing amnesia. The archaeological reex, most fundamentally, involves perpetually returning to these sites of amnesia, troubling over the lapses of discourse, the silences, and the omitted historieseven when there is no validating political space from which to justify ones line of historical concern. In Waiting for the Barbarians, the central character, the magistrate, has been described as an archaeologist, anthropologist, a digger for meaning, a detective, an explorer, a scientist, searching those ruins that lie under the dunes around the settlement (Olsen 1985:52). Through his own excavations, he hopes to decipher the unintelligible or illegible script of the barbarians, another poignant metaphor for the misreading of culture under imperial rule. He is prepared to imagine that the barbarians of the former settlement might have possessed a code in which it was possible to write history, and poignantly he nds that he does not possess such a code himself. Both his efforts to write a history of settlement and his antiquarian interests, underscored by his excavations and nights vigil spent in the ruins, are attempts to interpret the barbarian way of life before the onset of empire (Atwell 1993:77). For the dunes cover the ruins of houses that date back to times long before the western provinces were annexed (Coetzee 1980:14). Like all archaeological endeavors however, only fragmentary histories can be crafted from such fragile remains:
The barbarians, who are pastoralists, nomads, tentdwellers, make no reference in their legends to a permanent settlement near the lake. There are no human remains among the ruins. If there is a cemetery we have not found it. In a heap of ashes I have found fragments of sun-dried clay pottery and something brown which fell to pieces before my eyes . . . perhaps in my digging I have only scratched the surface. [Coetzee 1980:15]

more than a metaphorical connectivity. Coetzee seems to read in such outposts the colonial dynamic pushed to its most explicit material form. This is where he situates his characters, in the political seam in which the architecture of the colonial face, imagined as the stark colonial outpost, meets the terrain of the barbariana space always already reduced to ambiguity in the face of the precise architectural terms of the outpost. Coetzees unpacking of the characters that inhabit this space amounts to an important form of excavation, which enables a more profound reading of the standardized and seemingly endlessly reproduced facade of the colonial project. The work of the colonial facade, particularly as it comes to be reproduced globally, produces a sort of materially situated authority that is neither here nor there, and one that concomitantly enacts a certain suspension of local history and authority. Archaeology in South Africa and elsewhere has come to trouble over these colonial-era historical facades: How do they come to mesh with their interiors and their inhabitants? And how did the underclass weave their counterclaims in the multitude of estate slave lodges (Markell 1993), alleyways, side streets, and outbuildings that constituted colonial outposts (Hall 1991; Hall et al. 1993)? Often, the most impenetrable facade of the colonial outposts in South Africaas they come to be juxtaposed with such interior spaces, and their porous relation with the exteriorare, in fact, much less familiar than at rst glance. Nested within even the most seemingly familiar structural regularities are spaces awash in the local hybridity and personal memories of foreign landscapes (Winer and Deetz 1990) and memories of the spaces that elude the gridlike architectural style of the outpost (Reid et al. 1997). The excavator places oneself into a relationship to the particular ordering of these things. The act of excavation both forces a recognition of the fragility of erased pasts and the incomprehensibility of a past reduced to a frozen perpetuity. The fundamental obligation of the excavator is to reveal the discursive ruptures that allow for one history rather than another, and to reveal these constraints through the evidencing of multiple histories, in which previously there was only thought to be one (Foucault 1970). Coetzees allegory epitomizes the Foucauldian dynamic of power/knowledge by laying bare for the reader how these outer limits of the empire are literally shored up on the sandy temporal ambiguity of the Other (Faubion 1993). Yet buried in lees of crumbling forts and the sodden bowels of the edge of empire (Schrire 1995:2) and indeed perhaps at the very spot where you stand (Coetzee 1982:112), the archaeologist positioned at the outpost comes to understand these discourse-objects (Foucault 1970) as much more than the homogenous past of the barbarians. Rather, object by object, they disassemble the very foundations on which the empire is constructed. In every trace of micropractices and ancient lifeways, the artifacts pose a constant and dispersed instability that threatens to interrupt such political projects with the possibility of alternative histories. In South Africa, erased pasts continue to

The protagonist seeks to decode the past and thus understand the barbarians as they are framed and fashioned at the edge of empire. He places himself in the picture, interpolating another just like himself, in the same place in times gone by. Perhaps when I stand on the oor of the courthouse, if that is what it is, I stand over the head of a magistrate like myself, another grey-haired servant of Empire who fell in the arena of his authority, face to face with the last barbarian (Coetzee 1980:15). Empathy and relativism are key realizations for Coetzees character; thus, it is possible that the magistrate will also, in the not so distant future, become the barbarian to another other. He reects, space is space, life is life, everywhere the same (Coetzee 1980:16). Civilization, authority, and humanism are all challenged within the novel. Past, present, and future are also collapsed in his futile periodicities, and our protagonist despairs, I have even found myself reading the slips in a mirror, or tracing one on top of another, or conating half of one with half of another (Coetzee 1980:15). Following Durrant,

Meskell and Weiss Coetzee on South Africas Past

Coetzees novels seek to nd a way of relating to this underwritten history, this history that is simultaneously internal and external to the history of civilization, central yet excluded. Because they are themselves narratives, part of the history of civilization, they must attempt to relate to that which they themselves exclude, to that which they are themselves forced to under/overwrite. Their metactional contortions are a way of gesturing toward their own excluded interior, their own encrypting of the realm of material history. [2004:32]

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It is precisely in the space of these historical elisions that the certain redemptive quality of history has brought forth a proliferation of narratives, memories, and readings that have come to have immense political purchase in contemporary South Africa. Heritage emerges very much as a popularized sphere where such redemptive politics are at play, particularly as the rhetoric of national heritage has come to be a central medium through which the ANCs promise of inclusivity is expressed. Heritage emerges as a site not only of recovering forgotten pasts but also of reconciliation through the very practice of publicly recognizing and celebrating these marginalized pasts (Mbeki 2004). This process is at once personal and political. In many ways, it can be understood as a process of historical recognition that cannot unfold without the elicitation of private memories that reveal the fragility of historical and ethnographic narratives (Davidson 1998). In this sense, the project of creating history has come to reside as rmly in the domain of memory and mourning as it had previously resided within the colonial archive (Johnson 2003).

focused squarely on 20th-century history and have paid minimal attention to the longue dur e of the colonial past. e Much of this history of contactwhich is also a history of repressionhas been erased over successive decades: The National Party certainly sought to elide African achievements in the past as well as the long occupation of South Africa. Many dangerous fabrications were promulgated through school textbooks (Esterhuysen 2000; Smith 1983; Wits 2003) and continue to prove an obstacle today in rewriting those narratives. The situation is complicated by the sorts of archaeology that was encouragedone that most successfully directed attention to millennia-old questions of human ancestry and origins, rather than the last centuries of indigenous settlement and concomitant lifeways (Shepherd 2002, 2003a). In his now-published childhood memoir (1997), Coetzee explores the racialized embedding of his own education and the political subjectivity that underscored all information discussed at school. Racial propaganda was typical of the National Party narrative at the time, the suppression and misinformation about South Africas rich prehistory and subsequent volatile colonial history. Writing against the grain, Coetzee describes the killing of Dingaan by Piet Retief as murder, something that sets him apart from many South Africans probably even today (Coetzee 1997:66). But much of Coetzees literary attention has been focused on the issues of the Khoesan people of the Western Cape specically because he was born in Cape Town and subsequently grew up in the region. Again in Boyhood: A Memoir, he recalls his childhood education and his consequent realization that
Coloureds were fathered by the whites, by Jan van Riebeeck, upon the Hottentots: that much is plain, even in the veiled language of his school history book. In a bitter way it is even worse than that. For in the Boland the people called Coloured are not the great-grandchildren of Jan van Riebeeck or any other Dutchman. He is expert enough in physiognomy, has been expert enough as long as he can remember, to know there is not a drop of white blood in them. They are Hottentots pure and uncorrupted. Not only do they come with the land, the land comes with them, is theirs, has always been. [Coetzee 1997:62]

THE STATUS OF THE PAST IN THE NEW SOUTH AFRICA In the contemporary climate of national rebuilding, specifically in the domain of public life and popular culture, the past has been privileged in redressing the ills of the apartheid regime (Mbeki 2004) and similarly crucial to the creation and sedimentation of identities in the present. Thus, the past is inected with therapeutic benet, an imaginative solution tailored to South Africas national and international recovery (Meskell 2005, in press). Yet certain pasts have stronger valences. It has proven difcult in a climate of inclusivity and rainbow nationness to reinforce the specicities of deep past because they may prove even more divisive and destabilizing. Moreover, given the magnitude of recent histories, this would seem a more obvious avenue for public awareness, redress, and reconstitution. Yet it remains an ever-present challenge to South Africans who are in the business of memorializing the past to keep multiple versions of the past alive and not to privilege a select set of master narratives that offer a sense of unity at the cost of eliding the fracture and dissonance (see Nuttall and Coetzee 1998a:14). The recent horrors of apartheid brutality have, not surprisingly, occupied center stage in the efforts to rebuild the nation. In the desire to foreground those histories sites of cultural production, museums such as the Apartheid Museum or the Hector Pieterson Museum have

Although some might fault his naive romanticism itself a trope that has enacted much damage on the Khoesan (Garland and Gordon 1999; Gordon 1992; Kuper 2003; Wilmsen 1989, 1995)it remains a political statement of ethical import in a climate of land restitution, intellectual property debates, indigenous rights, and so on. Many disenfranchised South African constituencies, including the Khoesan (Robins 2002; Sharp and Douglas 1996; Sylvain 2002), are looking to this international lexicon of rights. Achille Mbembe suggests, whether the right being invoked cites the protection of the environment or the claims of indigenous peoples, the strategy is premised on a wounded identity. For the nation and its communities, a key avenue for reenchanting tradition and recycling local identities

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American Anthropologist Vol. 108, No. 1 March 2006 not exposing them to exploitation (Geldenhuys 2004:5). South African law prohibits children under 15 from working; it is also compulsory under the new constitution that they have schooling until the age of 15. Sitting around campres in loincloths, dancing, and performing traditional activities has been read as an abuse and a violation of all individuals rights to education. Ostri-Sans owner counters with the typical response that the childrens parents are destitute and cannot afford tuition. This participates in another colonialist trope; that of the lazy, lthy, and stupid native, adroitly critiqued by Coetzee, the writer, in both essays and novels alike (Coetzee 1988; see also Shepherd 2003b). In his famous essay on idleness in White Writing, Coetzee notes that idleness of Hottentots is denounced in much the same spirit as the idleness of beggars and wastrels [was historically] denounced in Europe (Coetzee 1988:21). In the colonial period, they were drawn into the tropes of European class warfare because of their refusal to be drawn into the economy as wage laborers. They are described as the laziest on earth, they never wash, they are ugly, their food is unclean, they wear skins and live in huts, they are sexually depraved, and their language is inhuman. For the European, perhaps then as now, Coetzee cleverly conjectures, the Hottentot are underdeveloped (Coetzee 1988:22). This takes us back to that other Coetzee, Andr the park owner, e and his entrepreneurial efforts in the Kalahari as well as the subsequent fate of the =Khomani San. Although the =Khomani won a historic land claim in 1999 and some 37,000 hectares of Kalahari land was returned to them, they have few resources and avenues for income and are thus susceptible to the predatory forces of capitalism. In interviews with some of the childrens guardians, it became clear that Andr Coetzee had in fact paid to take e possession of the children: a total of 70 Rand ($10) was paid to two women (Geldenhuys 2004). Given South Africas liberal democracy and attention to indigenous rights, it seems staggering that such abuses continue and that tourists (domestic and foreign) are so comfortable in their complicity. More surprising in South Africas moral economy is the fact that many of these visitors are school children themselves, brought there for the purposes of education about the heritage of their own nation. As Elizabeth Garland and Robert Gordon have eloquently argued, as long as people called bushmen are characterized as being in the throes of a process of development, they will be denied the fully modern subjectivity that the (developed) tourists who visit them enjoy. While tourism may indeed be providing bushmen with substantial benets, it is also ensuring that they remain permanently not quite like us, not yet (1999:283). In his introduction to White Writing, Coetzee tackles head on the racist inections of cultural progress, specifically in devastating manifestation in the South African context. He critiques the evolutionary schema of ascent, likening it to the layered concretions of an archaeological site, hunters, pastoralists, early agriculturalists, advanced precapitalist peasant agriculturalists (Coetzee 1988:10). On this ladder of complexity, the Khoekhoe and San peoples are

is the market and the markets role is particularly apparent in the contexts of tourism and the politics of heritage (Mbembe 2002:266). Unfortunately, these market interventions have often been felt in the Western Cape in the rise of what we term new primitivisms and the performance of past. Cultural heritage has assumed the status of cultural capital and, as in many contemporary societies, this reication is itself rooted in a capitalist value system. However, although the government has touted that heritage offers a wellspring for national pride and for economic growth in South Africa, the enabling infrastructure and linkages made between resources and outcomes often remains tenuous. After the 1994 elections, revitalizing a program of specifically African heritage was a necessity, albeit secondary to the agendas of restitution and civil infrastructure development. Yet heritage is repeatedly considered one of the prime movers for economic and spiritual empowerment after the depredations of the apartheid state. It is ultimately white investors that showcase indigenous culture for national and international tourists: The performers themselves are typically the resourceless communities who have little to market other than their own traditional, exotic market appeal. The environment of repressive tolerance that consistently reproduces such scenarios recognizes cultural difference only insofar as the cultural difference proves protable and, hence, amenable to popular stereotypes. Olsen notes that Coetzee, speaking of his own motivations and working against such a dynamic, claims that although some cultural artifacts reinforce the myths of our culture, others dissect these myths. In our time and place, it is the latter kind of work that seems to me more urgent (1985:47). Instead of learning the lessons of history, centuries of exploitation and the perverse curiosity that coalesces around cultural difference are now being played out in response to new international markets and calls for the recuperation of traditional African cultures. One such case is the recent furor over Ostri-San, a Kalahari theme park of sorts masquerading as a heritage experience. The park showcases the =Khomani San, specically their children, for the tourist gaze. Ostri-San, as the name suggests, combines an ostrich farm and San village. The very combination belies an obvious slippage between the natural world and those of humans (live bushmen), a dangerous conjunction that plays directly into racial fantasies long held in South Africa. In the ecology of objectication, the San are a species, like the ostrich, which have been placed in a suitable habitat. When interviewed, the parks owner, Andr e Coetzee (no relation to the novelist), stated that their complexion changes from a dull grey to the proper yellow a few weeks after arriving here. A Bushman who is well-fed is a yellow one (Geldenhuys 2004:5). Many of the performers are children, and public outrage mounted when the owner refused six of them adequate schooling. When confronted, Andr Coetzee claimed that e it is not necessary. Here, they are exposed to tourists and that builds character. . . . I am uplifting my Bushmen. Im

Meskell and Weiss Coetzee on South Africas Past at the base, whereas the Boer settlers of South Africa achieve the pinnacle. Linked to this dangerous set of assumptions which found resonance in every textbook and cultural production throughout the nation during apartheid (see Wits 2003)was the politicized taxonomy of race, specically in the surveillance and regulation of sexual unions and offspring. Lastly, another naturalized false construction coalesced around landscape, the idea that some individuals (read: primitives) were more wed to certain places of which they became an obvious extension of the ora and fauna (Rassool and Witz 1996). In this fabrication, too, the Khoekhoe became extreme examples of the undeniable, self-evident, natural constitution of colonial South Africa. Coetzee reminds us that Rousseau also wrote of the Hottentot as solitary and indolent savages. According to romantic discourse, it is the invention of tools that lifts man from this primitive state of savagery, and those same conveniences result in his eventual yoking to civilization. When the British took over the Cape colony in 1795, they effectively reinforced a similar ideology, imputing that the Khoekhoe way of life was characterized by low-level subsistence maintained by the minimal resort to wage-labor (laziness), wandering in search of greener pastures (vagrancy), and a sometimes casual attitude toward private property (thieving) (Coetzee 1988:26). It would have to be reformed by considerable discipline if the Hottentot was to have any stake (pull his weight) in the Colony (Coetzee 1988:26). Nests of idleness continued to be a phrase invoked by colonial magistrates in the 19th century. Yet during that time, Coetzee demonstrates, writers like Burchell in his Travels in the Interior of Southern Africa (1822) had indirectly challenged that view, articulating a life full of activity and vivacity among Khoesan communities. He quips that although we would not be so censorious of the idle Hottentots today, it would be a rather different case for the Boers: To foreign visitors, they appeared to lounge around their vast farmsteads with bovine languor (Hope 1988). Drawing on the legacy of anthropological and historical scholarship, he constructs a more nuanced version of 17th-century accounts of indigenous life at the Cape. Coetzee presupposes what we might observe, given another ethnographic moment. First, the gendering of activities and their implications and a recognition that San communities were immensely diverse. Second, those descriptions issued from within the Cape colony may have been more representative of literary mores and the writers sense of inadequate taxonomic material. Further, Coetzee elaborates that with our wider historical perspective, we might also appreciate better what a massive cultural revolution is entailed when a people moves from a subsistence economy to an economy of providence, from pastoralism to agriculturea move, indeed, in which the notion of work may be said to make its appearance in history (Coetzee 1988:34). Bringing the past into sharper contemporary relief, he reminds us that the challenge of idleness to work and its power to scandalize is as pressing today as it was in centuries past.

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In this critical essay, Coetzee reects on the role of the past, the place of history, and the legacy of anthropology in its insidious betrayal of a people. From an acknowledged Foucauldian perspective, Coetzee situates traditional forms of anthropology and history as disciplines of surveillance, tracking down of obscure societies around the globe photographing, recording, and deciphering their activities. The latter takes us back to the obsession of the magistrate with the even deeper past in Waiting for the Barbarians. HISTORICAL PRESENCE Coetzees work gives us pause to reect on what happened in history and its long-lived ramications, elaborating how historical forces shape present political contexts and identity deformations (see Abdi 1999). One would imagine that after the erasure of historyspecically African histories from public arenas, cultural productions, and educational settings that the subject of history would take on new valences and be ever-more popular. Oddly, however, history is not a growth industry in South Africa nor, as it happens, is archaeology. As Comaroff (2005) notes, Terence Ranger said some years ago, History is becoming today what Anthropology was in Africa in the 1950s, the discipline that dare not speak its name. Although South Africans seem to have been exercising their newfound rights of access to historical records and cultural performances, and as archive fever (Hamilton et al. 2002) has gripped the democratizing geist, this has made little impact on the place of historical disciplines in the academy (Rassool 2000). One of the major tasks for the new generation is to pursue a notion of transparency in this new democratic ethos, including (1) the opening up of records and of new arenas for public expression and ecologies of experience and (2) the [documentation of] the farthest reaches of apartheid and the struggles of countless people to resist racial oppression (Clark and Worger 2004:9). Other voiced concerns include fear of a reversal of history, in which either the populist ANC vision of the past will supplant all others or modes of rewriting will become triumphalist, celebratory accounts that simply replace white centrality with Afrocentric agendas (Erasmus and Pieterse 1999). The education minister, Kader Asmal, following the sentiment of Mbeki and others, has declared that promoting a strong study of the past is a particular educational imperative in a country like South Africa, which is itself consciously remaking its current history (Polakow-Suransky 2002:A36). Coetzee himself, in the guise of his characters, has made pointed claims of disinterest in the future, while alternatively recentering the importance of history. Elizabeth Costello, for example, provocatively states:
In fact the future in general does not much interest me. The future is, after all, only a structure of hopes and expectations. It resides in the mind, it has no reality. Of course you might reply that the past is likewise a ction. The past is history, and what is history but a story we tell ourselves, a mental construct? But there is something miraculous about the past that the future lacks. What is

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miraculous about the past is that whole nations, perhaps even humankind as a whole, have succeeded in making thousands and millions of individual ctionsthe ctions borne by individual human beings cohere well enough to give us a shared past, a shared history. The future is different. We do not have a shared ction of the future. The creation of the past seems to have exhausted our collective creative energies. Compared with our ction of the past, our ction of the future is a sketchy, barren, bloodless affair, as all visions of heaven tend to be. [Coetzee 2003:38]

Here, Coetzee is arguing that all nations, not only South Africa, must be mindful of the past and about our crafting and retelling of itspecically, the ethical narrating of a shared past. He sees the future as an immaterial and bloodless affair in comparison. From this perspective, archaeology must take on an even more salient political role, especially in postcolonial contexts such as South Africa, as material witness to the erased elements of the prehistoric epoch and the purposeful elisions suffered by the disenfranchised perpetrated at the hands of their oppressors. Through materiality, the archaeological remnants of the past or its representation in musealized (Huyssen 2003) settings are positioned at the interstices of subjective experience, community, memory, and collective histories. Many South African historians and archaeologists have been acutely aware of the contextual importance of the past and have critically engaged with its representation. In particular, archaeological discourse adroitly redresses the politics of forgetting (Meskell in press)specically, the erasure of the colonial past and its repressive regimes, which has come to characterize South Africa in the age of the TRC (see Nuttall and Coetzee 1998b). Writing from a wider ethical embrace, Coetzee concerns himself with the taxonomies and genealogies of racialized histories and how South Africa nds its own dark connections with fascist regimes. Writing about the old racial terminologies of Nazi discourse (Untermenschen; lit., unt, degenerate, slave races, etc.), Coetzee imputes that these claims stand for biological and anthropological realities, disappeared from public discourse, taking in their train a number of phrases involving blood (blood-consciousness, pure blood, tainted blood, etc.) as well as certain terms from the fringes of the science of heredity (taint, aw, degeneration) (Coetzee 1988:136). It is not difcult to connect these subtly shifting discourses to the increasingly hostile language and legal framings of the apartheid regime. Here, Coetzee draws attention to postwar effects including a will to forget, a horror of repetition and a purging of language that ensured that form of race consciousness would itself be terminated or go underground to emerge later in mutated form. Although this presages much of what has unfolded in postwar Germany, it similarly has strong resonance with events after the demise of apartheid. The notion of forgetting, the erasure of language, and the horror of repetition were all at work in democratic South Africa in the last decade. But Coetzee consolidates and historicizes this connection: In the national elections of 1948, many high level South

African politicians were Nazi sympathizers who instigated a program of racial legislation whose precursor if not model was the legislation of Nazi Germany (Coetzee 1988:137). Here, however, political prudence determined that this legislation would not follow that rationale of eugenics or biological destiny but would still mandate race classication, race separation, and race dominance. Although he is quite clear on the historical contexts in these essays, Coetzee reminds us that the generalities of such racialized positions pose clear and present dangers and that the errors of the past might easily be repeated if we are not ever vigilant. This harks back to Waiting for the Barbarians and the resultant critiques of his oeuvre, in general. In Coetzees view, the lessons of history cannot be escaped or deferred; furthermore, we who live in multicultural societies have at one time, or currently are, complicit in the disenfranchisement and repression of other populations, classes, communities, and so on. Taking us back before the rise of National Party and its program of racial divide and repression, back before Nazism as well, Coetzee critiques prior discourses for their naked, shameless bigotry. Quoting scientists and authors alike (Herbert Spencer, Ernst Haeckel, and Sarah Gertrude Millin), Coetzee reminds us that these views once stood for science and intellectual opinion, thus forming one of the most dominant ideological myths from the 19th century through to the 20tha biologically inscribed manifest destiny. He unpacks the myth, so popular in colonial times and existing to this day, focusing on the ideas and fantasies around complex fabrications of blood, aw, taint, and degeneration as it is posed in colonial writing and beyond. He refutes the easy isomorphism of biology and culture found within Social Darwinism. Further, Coetzee reminds us that
it is not strange that anthropology, as it grew to be a respectable disciplinethat is to say, as it became institutionalizedshould have centered on the study of race. One of the great tasks it set itself was to produce a taxonomy of human races within an evolutionist framework, to decide which were superior and which inferior and thus to predict what future might be expected for each. Nor is it strange, on the other hand, that the biologized history created by anthropologists, a history whose ideological function was after all to justify the triumph of the West to itself, should in certain quarters have gone hand in hand with a pessimistic, n de si` cle outlook. e [Coetzee 1988:144145]

Coetzee provocatively asks, why should one not foresee the triumph of the barbarian? What is the place of history for Coetzee, particularly in the context of South Africa? Returning to the central characterization of Waiting for the Barbarians and answering to some of his critics, this lack of specicity or naming in his own ctional writing nds more pointed ethical confrontation in his essays. In his novels, the central individuals are often the unhomely gures of and for alterity, they embody precisely that material history of suffering that the narrative is unable to represent. Their bodily presence indicates an unmournable, unverbalizable history, a material history that

Meskell and Weiss Coetzee on South Africas Past refuses to be translated into words or conjured away by language (Durrant 2004:26). What many commentators have found difcult to grasp is that, rather than mimetically reproducing the pasts historical facticity, Coetzees writing wrestles with the material, bodily affect of that history. Although a realist account of past brutalitycolonial and apartheid would constitute a palatable historical narrative, allowing us to mourn and move on, Coetzees novels resist this process of easy narration and relentlessly force us to confront the brute, indigestible materiality of the suffering that began with European colonization. Instead of exorcising history, his writings leave the reader with the appalling, irreconcilable sight of the abused and tortured bodies, stripped bare of the explanatory narratives of historical discourse (Durrant 2004:5051). And as the scandal of the Ostri-San Kalahari theme park makes clear, contemporary exploitations of the same peoples continues even under watchful eyes. At his broadest, Coetzee is concerned with the repetitions of historythe horric recurrences through time and space of racialized discourses of prejudice and genocide. In his narratives, such generalizations serve to remind us of the universalized nature of oppression and warn that we must all be vigilant so that such regimes do not resurface or resurgewhich is what continues to foster governmental ambivalence toward his work today. What is possible in Coetzees essays is not entirely possible in his dramatic historical ction in the same ways; yet through his allegorical style Coetzee is able to have a far more powerful and compelling ethical reach. Both sets of writing, however, underline his avid concern with history and its place in contemporary politics and worldviews. L YNN M ESKELL Department of Cultural and Social Anthropology, Stanford University, Palo Alto, CA 94305, and Rock Art Research Institute, University of the Witwatersrand, South Africa, Private Bag 3, WITS, 2050, Johannesburg, South Africa L INDSAY W EISS Department of Anthropology, Columbia University, New York, NY 10027 REFERENCES CITED
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